The Real Reason Ethics Slips Inside Good Organisations
Why ethical clarity fades quietly, and the conditions that help keep it strong.
Ethics is becoming one of the clearest indicators of organisational strength, yet it remains one of the least visible. The Governance Institute’s 2025 Ethics Index highlights this tension. Despite stro
ng expectations, public confidence in how institutions make ethical decisions remains modest, with the national ethics score sitting at 43 out of 100.[1]
For companies, this creates a practical challenge. Ethical clarity becomes harder to maintain when decisions move quickly and much of the work flows through procedures that were not designed to support reflection.
When purpose starts to blur
Ethical issues rarely appear abruptly. They build slowly, often in environments where decision making becomes highly procedural and people rely on familiar steps to navigate complexity. The procedures themselves operate as intended, but the purpose behind them can gradually recede from view.
This shift reflects how contemporary organisations function. Detailed steps manage risk, and automated tasks accelerate administrative decisions. These elements are necessary, yet they also influence where attention goes. As people move through decisions at speed, the step can become more prominent than the meaning behind it.
This is the early stage of drift: the work continues smoothly, but the reasoning behind it becomes less visible.
Investors are alert to this. They may not use the language of ethics, but they pay close attention to how organisations explain decisions and respond when situations fall outside standard rules. These behaviours shape their confidence in the organisation’s judgement.
A lesson from safety
Another discipline has travelled this path before. Safety strengthened when companies moved beyond messages and built reflection into the way work happened. The shift was not driven by new frameworks alone, but by habits that prompted people to pause before acting. These practices created space for attention when work intensified.
Ethics faces a similar tension. Many decisions now involve distributed teams, accelerated timelines and information that moves faster than context. Ethical principles remain central, but applying them consistently becomes harder as volume and complexity increase.
What helps is not additional oversight, but subtle supports that keep purpose in view. Ethics benefits from practices already familiar in safety: brief alignment checks before significant decisions, early conversations when uncertainty arises and deliberate pauses when something falls outside familiar patterns. These supports are light but effective, keeping purpose visible when work moves quickly.
Ethics in systems-driven environments
As more decisions are channelled through structured processes, another challenge emerges. Systems carry tasks forward reliably, but they do not preserve meaning unless it is deliberately maintained. When structured processes dominate, decisions can lose the context that gives them significance.
Supporting ethical clarity requires culture, leadership and process working together. At Wicklow, this shows up in simple ways. Fairness is considered when a framework allows more than one reasonable path. Reasoning is made visible when competing obligations pull in different directions. And when information is imperfect, decision steps note what was weighed so the judgement behind the outcome remains clear.
These adjustments help maintain the link between action and understanding, even in fast moving environments.
Keeping purpose anchored
Ethics works best when it is supported rather than assumed. It relies on environments where people can make grounded decisions even when circumstances are unclear. Culture guides behaviour, and structure ensures that behaviour remains possible as demands increase.
When these elements align, teams understand why a process exists, not just how to follow it. Leaders see how decisions are formed, not only the outcome. Systems help surface context rather than obscuring it.
Let’s imagine ethics embedded into governance in this way. Practical cues and transparent reasoning become part of how decisions are made, even in complex settings.
And in a landscape shaped by scrutiny and rising expectations, clarity of purpose has become one of the strongest signals of organisational maturity.
[1] The Ethics Index score reflects the public’s perception of how ethically Australians behave, measured on a scale where 100 represents a “highly ethical” society and 0 represents “not ethical”. A score of 43 indicates only moderate confidence.